Tag: University

  • Higher education postcard: University of Greater Manchester

    Higher education postcard: University of Greater Manchester

    Greetings from Bolton. Definitely Bolton.

    In 1824, a mechanics’ institute was established in Bolton. Mechanics’ institutes were a new phenomenon – the first was established in Scotland in 1821. They were, in essence, a subscription-based club which provided an opportunity for education, aimed at the better-off members of the working class.

    As the 1857 advert in the Bolton Chronicle shows, it was still going fifty years later.

    You can see the 1857 subscription fees in the advertisement. It’s hard to directly read across into today’s prices, because costs and wage structures change so much over the years. On a straightforward inflation calculation, using the Bank of England calculator, the annual fee would be about £50 today, which is a bit of a bargain. But comparing wages makes this feel different – for example, an average agricultural wage in 1857 was just shy of 11 shillings a week, so the subscription would be a quarter of a week’s wages. (And note also that the annual fee of ten shillings was just the quarterly fee multiplied by four. No discounts here for upfront payment.)

    The curriculum looks good, but elementary: school rather than higher education. And this makes sense – many people would have had minimal schooling. Only about 70 per cent of the population could read and write. And so a good basic education didn’t hurt.

    By the late 1880s there was a groundswell of opinion that Bolton needed better. As reported in the Bolton Evening News of 1 December 1886, the new chairman of the Mechanics’ Institute, Mr John Haywood MA, argued that:

    In Manchester, they are content with one well-equipped technical school; whereas in Bolton we must, forsooth, have three struggling institutions, with the result, as far as the Mechanics’ is concerned, that the progress made is in the direction of increased debt.

    The newspaper continued: “Mr Haywood thinks that Bolton has gone mad on sectarian and political distinctions when its young men cannot even sit on the same form to receive technical education.”

    And so in 1887 the committee of the Mechanics’ Institute agreed to establish a technical school. A committee was established, which raised funds, but found itself short; and an appeal was made to the county council. And in 1891 the Bolton Technical School opened.

    In 1926 Bolton Technical School became Bolton Technical College, and in 1941 a new building opened – that shown on the card – which enabled a broader range of courses to be offered. Engineering was, apparently, the most popular.

    In 1964 the college bifurcated, splitting the lower and higher level education. Bolton Technical College focused on FE, and the Bolton Institute of Technology focused on higher studies.

    A brief aside is now necessary, to introduce another institution, the Bolton Training College. This focused on training teachers for technical subjects and was one of three in the country doing this (the others being in Huddersfield and at Garnett College, in London). I’m afraid I can’t tell you when it was founded, but it is clear that there was a threat to close it in the 1950s, happily averted.

    And in 1982 the Bolton Institute of Technology merged with the Bolton Training College to form the Bolton Institute of Higher Education. This gained taught degree awarding powers in 1992, research degree awarding powers in 1996 and became a university in 2004.

    In December 2024 the university changed its name, becoming the University of Greater Manchester. And in what is becoming a bit of a busy year for the university, in governance terms, it was placed under enhanced OfS monitoring in February and suspended its vice chancellor in May. Let’s see what June and July bring for the university.

    The postcard was sent in October 1961 to Miss Medley in Andover.

    Dear Janet, Today I am going through to Blackpool to see “West Side Story”. The week has flown by, and tomorrow I shall have to return to the quiet South from the lively North. Love Jillian

    And here’s the customary jigsaw – hope you enjoy it. Comment below if you can identify the cars.

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  • UniSA, University of Adelaide retain staff numbers after merger – Campus Review

    UniSA, University of Adelaide retain staff numbers after merger – Campus Review

    University of South Australia vice-chancellor David Lloyd told a parliamentary committee meeting on Monday that 2,767 academic staff were transferred to the new Adelaide University last Saturday.

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  • EEOC Initiates Investigation Into Harvard University Over Racial Discrimination – CUPA-HR

    EEOC Initiates Investigation Into Harvard University Over Racial Discrimination – CUPA-HR

    by CUPA-HR | May 19, 2025

    On April 25, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Acting Chair, Andrea Lucas, issued a Commissioner’s Charge against Harvard University announcing that the EEOC is investigating whether “Harvard may have violated and may be continuing to violate Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] by engaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight employees, applicants, and training program participants in hiring, promotion (including but not limited to tenure decisions), compensation, and separation decisions; internship programs; and mentoring, leadership development, and other career development programs.”

    The charge also covers “entities managed by, affiliated with, related, or operating jointly with or successors to” Harvard University. This includes the institution’s medical school, school of public health, and school of arts and sciences, as well as the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, among others. The investigation will look back to 2018 for potential discrimination.

    As Acting Chair Lucas explains in the charge, the allegations “are based on publicly available information regarding Harvard, including, but not limited to, documents and information published on Harvard and its affiliates’ public webpages (including archived pages); public statements by Harvard and its leadership; and news reporting.” The charge references documents that were on Harvard’s website, including resources that tracked its decade-long progress to diversify its faculty, but these documents have since been deleted from the university’s website.

    Lucas highlights data showing a 10% drop in white men among “all ladder faculty” from 2013 to 2023 and the corresponding 10% increase in total women, nonbinary, and faculty of color in the same time span. She also points to the increase in the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty that are women, nonbinary, and/or people of color. Acting Chair Lucas believes Harvard took “such unlawful action in an effort to achieve, in Harvard’s own words, ‘demographic diversification of the faculty.’” Moreover, Lucas claims, “there is reason to believe that these trends and the underlying pattern or practice of discrimination based on race and sex have continued in 2024 and are ongoing.”

    The charge also emphasizes that various programs hosted by the university and its affiliates — including fellowship programs, research opportunities, and other initiatives targeted toward underserved groups, including Black and Native American students — demonstrate disparate treatment by the university and its affiliates against White, Asian, male, and straight applicants and training program participants.

    The EEOC’s Commissioner’s Charge is the latest escalation of the battle between Harvard and the Trump administration, which has frozen or paused billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, and initiated a task force to investigate the university’s behavior towards Jewish students. The Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services are also investigating the university, including for race-based discrimination.

    In a letter in response to the Department of Education, Harvard explained:

    “Employment at Harvard is similarly based on merit and achievement. We seek the best educators, researchers, and scholars at our schools. We do not have quotas, whether based on race or ethnicity or any other characteristic. We do not employ ideological litmus tests. We do not use diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in our hiring decisions. We hire people because of their individual accomplishments, promise, and creativity in their fields or areas of expertise, and their ability to communicate effectively with students, faculty, and staff. And we take all of our legal obligations seriously, including those that pertain to faculty employment at Harvard, as we seek to offer our students the most dynamic and rewarding educational experience that we can.”

    CUPA-HR will continue to monitor for updates related to this charge and other relevant enforcement activity at the EEOC.



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  • University Finance and Managing the Margins of Error

    University Finance and Managing the Margins of Error

    • By Huw Morris, Honorary Professor of Tertiary Education at the Institute of Education, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, and Richard Watermeyer, Professor of Education at the School of Education, University of Bristol.
    • Over the weekend, HEPI blogged on the possible consequences for universities and students of a new UK / EU agreement – see here.

    The financial challenges currently facing UK universities, as revealed by last week’s report from the Office for Students, have focused attention among university leaders, government policy makers and media commentators, as well as higher education staff and students, on four things:

    What has received less attention are variations between universities in the number of students recruited in general and international students in particular, as influenced by perceptions of institutional quality, and the wider incomes and costs of this provision. It is these things which impact on institutional margins, their surpluses and losses, and determine their longer-term financial sustainability. Most importantly, there are very big differences between universities when assessed by these measures. With a HM Treasury Spending Review and a Department for Education Higher Education White Paper expected imminently, it is these wider institutional economics and financial management issues which are the focus of this article.

    Higher Education Statistics (HESA) data reveals a very mixed pattern of financial activity and performance among the 302 higher education institutions that filed accounts for 2022/23, the last year for which full records are available. Income from all sources, including tuition fees, research funds, government grants, endowments and other miscellaneous sources for these organisations, has ranged from £84,000 at the Caspian School of Academics to £2.5 billion at the University of Cambridge. Despite such wide variance, 88 institutions are responsible for over 80% of the income; within this group, the 24 members of the UK’s Russell Group of research-intensive universities account for the lion’s share (47.3% despite attracting only 25.8% of total student numbers). This mismatch between volume and income is explained by the financial margins of course provision.

    The costs universities incur are similar. Salaries for academic, professional services and support staff vary, but national pay bargaining and pension arrangements mean that the differences are not great. Meanwhile, the costs of campus buildings per square metre and the unit costs of equipment are similar. So, while there are significant differences in the number of staff, size of university estate and scale of expenditure on equipment, most institutional leaders are alert to the key metrics that help to marshal these aggregate costs. The big difference in costs is in supporting research activity, with the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) data revealing £4.6 billion a year of unfunded activity. This is a measure of the research activity undertaken by university academic staff, which is not supported by research funds and appears to be undertaken within hours nominally allocated to other things, such as teaching and administration. It is this and related figures that the Minister of State for Skills is referring to when she challenges universities to be more transparent with the information they provide on their use of public money.

    At a UK level, information on this activity is not hard to find. Table C.1.2. of the OECD’s Education at a Glance reveals that the UK has a higher level of expenditure on research and development per HE student than the US, despite very much lower levels of Gross Domestic Product per capita. The proportion of unfunded research activity varies considerably between institutions and is lowest among Russell Group universities and highest among institutions that are seeking to increase activity from a lower base.

    What is understood by most university leaders, but less commonly by policymakers and the media, is the vital role of operating margins in determining whether a university is financially sustainable. The role of margins is best illustrated by comparing two fictional universities.

    University A is a large research-led institution that offers a wide range of courses to home and overseas students. In 2021/22, in keeping with the average Russell Group university, one third of its students were recruited from overseas and its position in the Chinese Academic World Ranking of Universities (AWRU) – and to a lesser extent the QS and THE World rankings – enabled the university to charge fees of £80,000 for its MBA programme, £60,000 per year for its Medicine degree to overseas students, and £20,000 per year for its doctoral programme. These high fees and the large volume of students applying for a limited number of places generated sufficient margins (gross surplus) to subsidise the costs of the less remunerative courses for home students in subject disciplines such as English Literature where the full-time undergraduate degree fee is £9,535 per year. This was important because the cost of these courses with the higher charging courses for international students was typically twice the £9,535 per full-time student income earned from UK students, not least because of the costs of the providing time and resources for staff research in these disciplines where there was no grant income to support this activity. These funds also provided the financial resources to underpin some of the research work of academic staff and their professional services colleagues.

    The picture is less rosy at University B, a large former polytechnic, with a much lower ranking in international league tables and which is consequently less competitive in attracting Chinese international students. Instead, University B is dependent on recruiting first-generation international students; students typically from less wealthy families, unable to afford the premium fees charged at University A. At University B, the fee for an MBA is £20,000, although this is often discounted and then diluted by recruitment agency fees. The high sticker price and subsequent use of discounting is used because the advertised fee is a marker of quality and the discount fee is used to draw the student in by adjusting the amount to what they can afford and flattering them into believing the university wants them for their talents. University B does not have a Medical school and so a comparator fee is not available, but the fee for an international student on a science and technology degree is £18,000. When diluted by agents’ fees and discounted prices, this fee may drop below the costs of provision. Finally, the PhD course fees of £5,000 per year only cover half the running costs in order to attract students who will help to boost external assessments of the research undertaken by this university.

    Figure 1. Course prices and costs compared

    The net effect of the combination of different course prices and costs at University A and University B is that the former is making significant gross surpluses and the latter is making significant gross losses. It is important to note that this pattern of surpluses and losses is also evident in the financial performance of other university services, including, for instance, franchise courses in the UK and overseas, student accommodation, conference facilities, catering and other services. This is because the prices charged by institutions with less auspicious reputations and league table positions are lower than those of their competitors, but the costs are similar.

    There are also issues associated with capital requirements (the need for funding to pay for the renewal and replacement of buildings and other assets) and risk exposure (the extent to which future activity is certain and predictable). The number of young British people wanting to study at UK universities has historically been predictable, and while there has been competition between universities, this competition has rarely led to institutional failure. Institutions may have got smaller, closed courses, and on occasion merged, but they have not been forced into insolvency. Such relative assurance may wane in future as risks rise and the need to renew and replace buildings and other capital assets grows.

    We might, for instance, reasonably anticipate increased risk associated with international student recruitment where geopolitical and concomitant financial volatility impact the inward migration of students into UK universities. While we have already witnessed the inhibitory effects of visa rule changes, we can reasonably expect exchange rate fluctuations and changes to the proclivity of overseas governments to fund students studying in the UK to further increase these risks. In the medium term, a requirement to maintain a high ranking in international university league tables, as corresponding justification for high fee charges, compels sizable financial investment in buildings, equipment, and staff to maintain the research performance.

    Assessment of university performance in the AWRU, QS and THE World University rankings is dependent on research performance measured by citations and, in the case of the QS and THE specifically, the reputation of the institution in the eyes of senior leaders in other universities and the opinions of employers. These ratings are influenced by past rankings and impressions of campus quality. In the long term, maintaining these league table positions is likely to become more demanding for three reasons.

    • First, the drive by governments in many other countries to create their own ‘world-class’ universities leads to an increase in the costs of competing and a consequent decline in margins.
    • Second, the growing prominence of philanthropy and alumni giving looks set to make up an increasing proportion of the funding of highly ranked institutions, though this is less of a feature in UK higher education. In the USA, for example, higher education endowment is around $800 billion and is growing by 150% per year. Endowments now account for 50% of the income of Harvard University and a very sizeable proportion of the income of other Ivy League and American research-led institutions. Of course, whether this remains the case in the face of challenges from President Trump’s new administration remains to be seen.
    • Finally, in the longer term (10 to 30 years), it seems reasonable to predict that developing countries in the Global South will develop their own higher education provision, and the number of young people travelling overseas to study will reduce, as is being encouraged by the China-Africa 100 University plan and similar initiatives.  

    The lessons of this analysis for institutional leaders and their governing bodies and councils are that they should broaden their focus to consider the operating margins on all their activities, (that is, teaching, research, accommodation, conferences, room and equipment hire) as well as the investment requirements to maintain this performance in the medium to long term. Without engaging in these types of analysis, the risks of cashflow problems will grow and the longer-term sustainability of these institutions will be jeopardised.

    The lesson for governments is that they should look at the real costs of different courses and focus the funding that is made available through student loans and grants on those activities which will provide the greatest sustainable private and public benefit in the long run. This means aligning the funding with future needs, as defined by assessments in the NHS Workforce plan and the analyses by Skills England, Local Skills Improvement Plans and the UK shortage occupation list and, where this is not the case, subject areas where it seems probable that the student loans will be repaid. If institutions wish to fund programmes that fall outside these lists, then they can subsidise these courses with surpluses made from other activities. The issues outlined above also mean that the pressures facing institutions are different, and it is probably beyond the capability of the Department for Education and the Office for Students to oversee the transitions that will be needed in many of the 452 higher education institutions in the UK. To handle these changes will require additional leadership, management and governance resource and ideally greater local and regional stewardship for most institutions.

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  • University of Tasmania continues cuts to Arts, Humanities – Campus Review

    University of Tasmania continues cuts to Arts, Humanities – Campus Review

    The University of Tasmania (UTAS) is set to cut 13 full-time staff as it proposes a massive shake-up of its humanities, social sciences, creative arts, and media schools amid declining student enrolments.

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  • New Jersey City University takes key step to become part of Kean University

    New Jersey City University takes key step to become part of Kean University

    Dive Brief:

    • New Jersey City University is set to become part of nearby Kean University after the two public institutions signed a letter of intent Thursday to combine by June 2026. The merger would be subject to accreditor and regulatory approvals.
    • Under the plan, Kean would assume NJCU’s assets and liabilities and operate the institution as “Kean Jersey City,” the universities said. Executive oversight would fall to Kean’s president, who would appoint a chancellor to lead Kean Jersey City. NJCU will have some representation on Kean’s board of trustees, per the letter.
    • NJCU signaled in March that it planned to pursue a merger with Kean after past years of budgetary struggles and a directive from a state-appointed monitor to find a financial partner.

    Dive Insight:

    In Thursday’s release, Kean and NJCU said that their combination would “preserve NJCU’s mission of serving first-generation, adult and historically underserved students while advancing Kean’s role as the state’s urban research university and a newly designated R2 research university.” 

    Luke Visconti, chair of the NJCU’s trustee board, said Thursday’s letter of intent “provides an important framework for the detailed discussions that will follow.” 

    Still to come are full due diligence, a definitive agreement and a detailed outline for combining the two public universities. That process will be collaborative and “rooted in student and community engagement” so that the merger with Kean celebrates the two “distinct cultures” of the universities, NJCU Interim President Andrés Acebo said in a statement. 

    According to the institutions, an integration planning team with representatives from both universities will begin work immediately, coordinating with New Jersey’s state higher education office. The two universities will develop shared services agreements to streamline operations and boost student success, officials said. 

    Kean is the larger institution of the two, with 13,352 students in fall 2023, which was down by 5% from five years prior, according to federal data.  NJCU, meanwhile, had 5,833 students in 2023, down 10.8% from the year before and 27% lower than 2018 levels. 

    NJCU’s enrollment declines have contributed to its recent financial turmoil. A little over three years ago, the university declared a full-blown financial crisis after heavy spending on real estate expansions, student services and scholarships failed to reverse its enrollment slowdown and enlarged the university’s expenses.

    In 2023, the state comptroller’s office issued a scathing report that accused administrators of failing to fully inform NJCU’s board of the dire financial state, and which also suggested the university “likely” broke federal law by using emergency pandemic funding for an existing scholarship program. 

    Since then, Acebo has taken the reins, and the state has appointed a monitor to help ensure NJCU rights its finances and operations. State lawmakers also provided $17 million in critical stabilization funding to the institution.  

    In November, Fitch Ratings lifted the university’s outlook from negative to stable, citing “significant progress toward achieving fiscal balance despite continued pressure on student enrollment.”

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  • Harvard University devotes $250M to sustain research hit by federal cuts

    Harvard University devotes $250M to sustain research hit by federal cuts

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    Dive Brief:

    • Harvard University will put $250 million of its own funds toward research affected by the ongoing wave of federal cuts, according to a Wednesday announcement
    • Since last week, Harvard has received “a large number of grant terminations from the federal government,” President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning said in a campuswide message. The funding disruptions are halting “lifesaving research and, in some cases, losing years of important work,” they said.
    • Harvard is taking the same tack as Northwestern and Johns Hopkins universities, which announced in April they would use institutional dollars to cover the cost of ongoing research hit by cuts.

    Dive Insight:

    Northwestern and Johns Hopkins began self-funding some of their own research after hundreds of millions of their federal funding had been lost or frozen due to the Trump administration.

    Since Trump retook office, several federal agencies have abruptly changed their funding policies, cutting off billions in grants and contracts with little to no warning. The National Institutes of Health alone slashed $1.8 billion in a little over a month, according to findings published in JAMA last week. 

    Harvard is now similarly self-funding affected research. But the federal government’s attacks against it outpace those directed at many of its peers. 

    Last month, the Trump administration canceled over $2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard after the Ivy League institution publicly rebuked its ultimatums, arguing they overstepped the federal government’s authority. Among the demands, the administration sought a third-party audit of the viewpoints of university employees and students and wanted Harvard to selectively curtain the power of certain employees based on their activism. 

    The university is now bracing for even more cuts and mounting a legal battle against the Trump administration to regain its federal funding. 

    The university intends to fight the government’s “unlawful freeze and termination” of many of its grants and is doing what it can in the interim, Garber and Manning said Wednesday.

    “Although we cannot absorb the entire cost of the suspended or canceled federal funds, we will mobilize financial resources to support critical research activity for a transitional period as we continue to work with our researchers to identify alternative funding sources,” they said.

    They added that the university will advocate for “the productive partnership between the federal government and research universities” that has existed for over eight decades.

    Over 50 higher ed organizations, led by the American Council on Education, made a similar plea in a joint statement Wednesday.

    “The entire country benefits when policymakers and higher education leaders respect a common understanding of the vital role colleges and universities play in advancing the social, cultural, and economic well-being of the United States,” the organizations said.

    They argued that the release of research funds should not be contingent on which students colleges enroll, what programs they offer or how they oversee their instructors. The signatories also include the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the New England Commission of Higher Education, Harvard’s accreditor.

    Prior to its announcement Wednesday, Harvard had already implemented a hiring freeze for the spring semester. And dozens of faculty members have pledged 10% of their salaries to shore up against the “severe financial damage” the university faces as it takes the Trump administration to court.

    Garber recently made a similar pledge. He will take a voluntary 25% pay cut beginning in July, a university spokesperson said Thursday. 

    Harvard has not yet publicly disclosed the new president’s salary. But his predecessors have made north of $1 million annually, meaning his voluntary pay cut in fiscal 2026 would likely net the university six-figure savings.

    Garber, a longstanding Harvard employee, has taken a pay reduction during turbulent financial times before. As provost, Garber took a 25% cut in 2020 in response to the pandemic, as did the university’s then-president and executive vice president.

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  • Between Excellence and Relevance: The Regional University Dilemma

    Between Excellence and Relevance: The Regional University Dilemma

    Hi everyone.  I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast.

    Over the past few decades, Higher Education had taken on a number of new roles.  As we discussed with Ethan Schrum on this podcast over two years, in the years after World War II, universities became obsessed with showing how essential they were with solving society’s problems.  One of these problems – particularly as universities proliferated and started showing up in more and more distant locales – was regional economic development. 

    This was a tough problem to solve.  Universities are about the knowledge economy, and by and large the knowledge economy runs most smoothly in places with significant population density.  By definition, “regional” or “peripheral” institutions are in places that lack this essential quality.  So with whom can universities in this situation partner?  It takes two to tango – a university .  And more generally, what kinds of things can universities in peripheral regions that can do to improve the economic fortunes of the places they serve?

    Today my guest is Dr. Romulo Pinheiro.  He is a professor of public policy and administration at the University of Agder in Norway.  For years now, Romulo has been writing about how universities in different parts of Europe tackle this question.  In our interview today, we go back and forth a bit about how peripheral institutions differ from metropolitan ones, how regional and global ambitions get intertwined at these institutions and how institutional and disciplinary structures do and do not affect how a peripheral universities accomplish their mission.  As a wannabe-geographer, I found this discussion fascinating – pay attention to the bits where Romulo starts diving into the intricacies of how institutions and academics weave their global and local networks together into complicated webs, and – let me underline this bit – how these webs depend crucially on something pretty simple: trust. 

    But enough from me – let’s turn it over to Romulo.


    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.31 | Between Excellence and Relevance: The Regional University Dilemma

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Romulo, your work often centers around issues of universities and regional development. And I guess it’s been 40 or 50 years now that regional development has been seen as a role that higher education is supposed to play. But how does that development role differ between universities in dense urban areas and, you know, less dense rural areas? What’s the difference in the role they have to play?

    Rómulo Pinheiro (RP): Alex, for universities to be able to engage with different types of regional actors, there have to be competencies on the other side. Universities differ in terms of their competencies and skills—in terms of the depth and breadth of the types of programs they offer, the research groups, as well as the traditions of regional engagement. But they also differ in their localities, right?

    Usually, you have a situation where universities in peripheral regions are thinner institutions, and they’re located in thinner institutional environments. Meaning, they don’t have a lot of interlocutors with the same level of knowledge and skills. That already creates a disadvantage.

    So, should we see the symbiosis between universities and their regional settings? By and large, we see that strong institutions tend to be located in strong regional surroundings as well. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t cases of strong institutions in more peripheral settings. What the literature tells us is that, for the most part, these regions don’t have the absorptive capacity to absorb both the graduates and the knowledge that comes from these “thick” institutions.

    Johns Hopkins is a case in point in Baltimore. And in Europe, we have, for example, the University of Lund. There have been a few studies as well. So the knowledge generated by these institutions tends to go away from the region because there’s no regional capacity to absorb what comes out of the university.

    So, very different roles.

    AU: It seems to me there are two types of rural or peripheral institutions. Let me talk about one of them first, right? So, smaller peripheral institutions—I’m thinking, you know, universities maybe in northern Norway, right? A couple thousand students. They face tight budgets, limited research capacity, and more difficulty, I imagine, in attracting top talent. Maybe not in Norway, but in some countries that would be an issue. And yet, they’re often expected to play an outsized role in regional development. How do they manage that tension?

    RP:  That’s a great question—and indeed, many don’t, right? You’re absolutely right that we should move away from the idea of just “centers” and “periphery,” because there are also centers within the periphery. There are strong institutions in peripheral settings. In northern Norway, for example, we have the University of Tromsø, which is a comprehensive, research-intensive institution. And there are many smaller regional colleges across the Nordic region that don’t have that capacity.

    Traditionally, these institutions have catered more to the applied needs of regional actors. They didn’t have the research infrastructures, so they got involved in what we call “projects,” right? Smaller projects. And that, of course, has limitations.

    Other, bolder institutions try to collaborate—develop networks. What we see, for example, in Northern Europe is a situation where, due to mergers, the smaller institutions are becoming amalgamated into larger institutions. And that, of course, creates new possibilities and new conditions, but also new tensions and dilemmas.

    Because as institutions grow—and as you know, the larger the institution, the more globally oriented scientists you have—the less likely they are to be involved with regional issues, all things being equal, as economists like to say.

    But in the end, it also goes back to the idea of engagement at the academic level—the bottom-up, right? So this combination between… well, you can have all these great strategic plans and funding in place, but if academics themselves—what Burton Clark calls the academic heartland—don’t feel keen to be engaged with regional actors, you can’t pressure them.

    AU: I’m going to come back to that global dimension in a second. But let me counter with something here. I’m not convinced that the larger institutions are necessarily more global, but they are probably more oriented towards basic research, right? As you get bigger and bigger departments, they get deeper into basic research.

    And what’s the uptake of basic research in peripheral areas? I mean, it just seems to me that when you get past a certain institutional size or complexity, it gets very hard to actually even talk with local communities—because the capacity for generating research is much bigger than the receptor capacity for it.

    I remember one example, when we were doing some work in Africa. There was a small private university outside Lagos, and they had sequenced the Ebola virus. I asked, “Can you work with local industries?” And they said, “We can’t work with the local pharmaceutical industry, because in Africa the pharmaceutical industry is packaging and marketing.” Right? Those are the only two functions.

    So what happens when the science at a small regional institution outruns the receptor capacity of the local environment? Are there any good ways to manage that?

    RP: It goes back to the example I gave earlier. For the most part, that knowledge tends to go away—to other regions or other localities. This is the global dimension. But this goes back to the point you raised about the brokering role of universities. Universities—or university actors—have to engage in a process of translating those basic research findings into something that can be applied at the local level.

    So how do they do that? There are different mechanisms. You need professors who are engaged and able to facilitate the translation of more theoretical discussions into something more concrete.

    The role of students is fundamental here—an aspect that has been somewhat neglected in the literature. In the end, the most important boundary spanners are actually students who spend time back and forth between the university and the community. And then there’s the role of graduates—former students. They maintain networks with professors and others, so they play a very important role.

    But in the end, if the companies—public or private—don’t have a need for that knowledge, or if that knowledge is not relevant to them, then they won’t use it. There’s that tendency.

    So it’s also up to the universities to try to make that basic knowledge—if they are so inclined—relevant to local actors. In northern Norway, we have the case of Tromsø, which has been able to do this: bring excellence and relevance together. They focus, for example, on the Sámi dimension, Arctic fauna and flora, or cardiovascular diseases—taking aspects that are relevant to the region and developing excellence around those areas.

    And in the process, they develop institutional capacity, which helps them with strategic profiling in a globally competitive world.

    AU: You’re raising again that issue of global excellence versus regional relevance. I’m interested in that from the perspective of university strategy. What avenues do you have to make sure that your institution is actually balancing those two properly? You used Tromsø as an example—can you think of some others? And are there any commonalities between them?

    RP: Yeah. I mean, university leaders do have some tools at their disposal. As we know, most universities—particularly large ones—are very bottom-heavy institutions. Academics tend to have a lot of autonomy and are relatively independent in what they pursue.

    That being said, they also follow incentives, as rational actors. So there are things that strategic or university leaders can do to align those incentives—whether that’s through PhD student opportunities, sabbaticals, or other types of incentives to collaborate with regional actors.

    Beyond Tromsø, there are other examples I’ve worked on. Oulu is another case in point—in Finland. There’s a very interesting anecdote, going back to the importance of networks. One study asked actors in Oulu, in Northern Finland, “Who are your most important collaborators?” People at the university mentioned individuals from industry and local government.

    Then the same question was asked in another region—northern Sweden, in a place called Luleå—which wasn’t as regionally engaged. They asked, “Who are your most important collaborators?” Regional actors in the private sector mentioned other actors in the private sector. University academics mentioned other academics.

    Those are examples of disconnected networks—networks that are operating within their own silos. So, there has to be a sort of synergy effect, and the most successful regional institutions are able to achieve that.

    One interesting caveat: when you ask these institutions whether they see themselves as regional universities, most of them don’t like that label. They say, “We are, first and foremost, a university in the region—not a regional university.” There are some negative connotations associated with being too closely tied to locality.

    AU: What I’m hearing you say is that we have to pay attention to the incentives for professors within the university to engage locally and form those local partnerships. Are there specific institutional reforms that can achieve that? And presumably, disciplinary mix matters, right? There are different incentives and different possibilities for collaboration across disciplines. So how do you manage that engagement? How do you incentivize it effectively?

    RP: There’s been a long discussion within the field about what types of incentives work. And again, there’s no one-size-fits-all—this has to be tailored. Academics are incentivized in very different ways. But we do know that, for the most part, monetary incentives have a limited effect when compared to other professions.

    So it’s more about things like whether you can gain more autonomy, develop your research group, or set up a center. What we’re seeing now, for example, in the Nordic countries is an orchestrated effort by national and regional funding agencies to ensure that research applications require buy-in from regional actors.

    I can’t submit an application to the Norwegian Research Council or to Business Finland, for example, without having partners from the region or the nation—whether from the public or private sector. Those are structural mechanisms designed to ensure that, if academics want access to significant research funding and to grow their research teams, they need to bring on board those key external actors.

    The second aspect is the very strong emphasis over the past, say, seven to ten years—especially post-COVID—on co-creation and co-production of knowledge. Rather than involving regional actors only at the end of a research project, now there’s an effort to bring them in at the design stage.

    So, researchers will go into a project already with input from those actors, understanding key questions and issues of relevance. And then, throughout the project, they involve these actors through various mechanisms—workshops, feedback exercises, and so on—to ensure there’s a loop of engagement and input.

    It’s a much more egalitarian sort of ecosystem. Whether or not this is working is still an empirical question—we don’t yet know the full results. But at least those are the intentions.

    AU: Romulo, you talked about this interface between the global and the local, right? And the global part of that is usually about relations between academics in one part of the world and academics in another. That helps a local university—a university in a region—act as kind of a window on the world for that region. It brings them into contact with these global networks.

    What’s the right way to think about developing those networks effectively? I mean, I know in Europe right now we’ve got the European Universities Initiative. And I think a number of those alliances are meant to unite institutions with similar missions. A number of them look like alliances of universities and regions. Is this promising? Is this the right way forward? Or are these initiatives missing something?

    RP: Let me touch first on the issue of networks. Most of these networks emerge organically, and they’re very much linked to the relationships that academics have with other academics—or academics have with regional actors. Students can also play a role here—if they get employment locally, and of course, former students may become part of regional government or industry.

    The key element here is trust. This is not new—trust takes time to generate. I think it’s not easy, if you’re sitting in the director’s chair at a university, to articulate a clear strategy for how to develop trust among all these actors. You have to create the conditions.

    That might mean freeing up some resources, or identifying your most engaged academics—those most likely to involve students or work regionally—and then creating a kind of ecosystem to bring these people together. We used to say that the most important thing in regional engagement is having money for lunches and dinners—that’s where people get to know each other.

    When it comes to the second part of your question—strategic alliances—I’m a bit skeptical about the extent to which these will benefit the regional engagement agenda, to be honest. Even those alliances, like the one my own institution is part of—with a regional name and focus—tend to become very inward-oriented.

    I’ve got a number of publications coming out now with a colleague, where we argue that these alliances are primarily collaborative exercises meant to enable institutions to compete globally. And there’s a tendency—despite some efforts, like policy labs for students involving regional actors and regional questions—for other strategic imperatives, outside of the region and locality, to end up dictating institutional priorities.

    That’s my sense. But again, it’s an important empirical question. We’ll have to see in the future what the results actually are.

    AU: So, there’s been a tendency in North America—probably going back to World War II or maybe even a little before—to think about universities as fixers of social or economic problems. And you’ve cautioned against assuming that universities can act as fixers of regional challenges, especially in peripheral contexts in Europe.

    I guess this is a more recent assumption about institutions—maybe 30 or 40 years old instead of 60 or 70. Where do you think that expectation comes from? And what are the risks of leaning too heavily on it?

    RP: That caution also comes from my fieldwork. I remember when I was doing my PhD many years ago, I was in South Africa at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, speaking with the vice-chancellor there. And he told me:

    “Look, we are keen to play an active regional role, but we are not going to clean the streets just because the local government is failing to clean the streets. We don’t have the capacity to tackle crime just because the police lack the resources to do so.”

    He was very clear in saying that part of their job was to go into the community and educate people—not just about the possibilities, but also about the limitations that universities and academics face. It is not their role to solve the failures of market forces or government systems.

    There’s a tendency among some local officials to scapegoat the university—to say, “You’re not delivering,” because they’re not helping to tackle poverty or similar issues. That’s not to say universities don’t have an important role. But most of us in the field believe universities have primarily a facilitating role—a generative role—rather than acting as engines of regional development.

    Of course, in those peripheral regions where the university is the largest employer or the only knowledge institution, expectations tend to be that the university must play a disproportionate role. Often, it tries to do so—and in many cases, it succeeds. But in the majority of cases, the university is just one of many knowledge actors in a very complex ecosystem.

    AU: Your work has obvious ramifications for higher education leaders—but also for politicians, right? The ones who are funding these institutions. If there’s one concept or one conceptual insight from your work that you think those groups should take seriously—higher education leaders and politicians—what would it be? It might not be the same for both. They could be different for the different audiences.

    RP: As a traditional academic, let me give you two instead of one.

    The first one—and I’m not the only one saying this, but I think my work reinforces it—is that both universities and regions are complex entities. They are not monolithic, but they tend to be approached by both politicians and university managers as if they are simple, strategic actors. In reality, they have deep histories and institutionalized traditions, which are very difficult to change. So, any attempt to use strategic agency to move universities or regions in a particular direction should take that into account.

    The second aspect links to my recent work on resilience. Over time, we’ve seen that universities have an innate capacity to adapt to social change and play very different roles. The “third mission” of the university—regional development or societal impact—looked very different in the early 20th century than it does today. Yet, universities have managed to withstand and adjust to adversity while retaining a degree of function and identity.

    To do that, they need two important ingredients. One is autonomy—which is currently under threat, both in terms of procedural and substantive autonomy. The second is diversity. From resilience studies, we know that resilient institutions are diverse institutions. So when politicians or managers promote a “lean” approach—saying, “we have two research groups working on similar areas, let’s kill one or merge them”—they’re actually reducing diversity. And reducing diversity reduces an institution’s ability to withstand future adversity—whether it’s a pandemic, geopolitical conflict, or other disruptions. That may seem efficient in the short term, but it’s dangerous in the long term.

    That’s why universities have historically been able to adapt to changing societal conditions—they’ve had those two ingredients, which are now at risk.

    AU: So given that, what’s the future of university–community engagement in peripheral regions? Is there a trend we can expect over the next 10 years? Are institutions going to be able to deliver more fully on the needs of their regions—or will they find it more difficult?

    RP: Well, as you know, Alex, academics are very bad at predicting the future! But we can look to history to see how things have evolved.

    What we’ve seen is that the university’s “third mission”—whether framed as regional development, social impact, or engagement—has increasingly moved closer to the university’s core activities. Today, you could argue that social impact is central to the mission of any university. That might not be new in the U.S., but at least in Europe, it’s a more recent shift over the last 10 to 15 years.

    What I think is important—and colleagues like David Charles in the UK have also emphasized—is that we need to look at the challenges facing our societies: rising polarization, the spread of illiberal democracies, the post-truth society. We should be asking: what role can universities—particularly in peripheral regions—play in helping societies navigate this turbulent environment?

    As the quintessential knowledge institutions, universities have a very important role to play. They should perhaps be more active and assertive in defending the importance of knowledge, of truth. I’m currently involved in projects on regional green transitions, and there’s a broad consensus that universities play a vital role mediating relationships among regional actors with very different agendas.

    They still retain legitimacy. They haven’t been politicized to the extent that other institutions have. So they’re uniquely positioned to bring political and community actors together and help orchestrate collective agendas.

    But that takes time. It doesn’t always yield short-term results. So university leaders need to be willing to take risks. They need to allow academics to play roles that go beyond the traditional functions of teaching and research.

    So I think what we’re seeing is a rediscovery of the civic role of universities—at an important historical moment. A shift from discussions about interests and money to discussions about values and norms.

    AU: Romulo, thank you very much for joining us today.

    RP: Thank you very much, Alex.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.

    This episode is sponsored by KnowMeQ. ArchieCPL is the first AI-enabled tool that massively streamlines credit for prior learning evaluation. Toronto based KnowMeQ makes ethical AI tools that boost and bottom line, achieving new efficiencies in higher ed and workforce upskilling. 

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  • Bastyr University Plans to Sell Campus

    Bastyr University Plans to Sell Campus

    Cash-strapped Bastyr University is selling its campus in Washington State in an effort to stabilize its shaky finances, which landed the institution on show cause status with its accreditor earlier this year.

    Bastyr’s Board of Trustees approved a plan last week to list the campus for sale.

    The Washington campus is located on 50-plus acres outside Seattle; the university also maintains a site in San Diego. Officials wrote on a frequently asked questions webpage that the “sale of the [Washington] campus will restore financial health to our university, allow continued movement forward with our strategic plan and is intended to positively impact our accreditation status.”

    The FAQ page emphasized that selling the campus does not mean Bastyr is closing.

    Rather, “Financial infusion makes the university more stable and allows us to better weather the fluctuations of the academic environment should a crisis occur,” officials wrote. They also noted Bastyr “cannot afford to maintain and modernize the main campus building” and that “the university occupies less than 50% of its space, but must fund 100% of campus upkeep.”

    The FAQ indicated that either a full or partial sale of the campus is possible. 

    Despite the sale, a move will likely be years away; officials wrote on the FAQ page that Bastyr plans to lease the campus for “up to a few years to allow for a thoughtful and phased transition.”

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